OLYMPICS

OLYMPICS; Where Have All The Runners Gone?

By BILL PENNINGTON

Published: July 15, 2004

It has been 32 years since an American man has won an Olympic gold medal in a middle-distance track event. The American record in the mile, 3 minutes 47.69 seconds by Steve Scott, has stood for 22 years. In the middle distances, defined as the 800 meters and the 1,500 meters, there has not been an American man ranked No. 1 in the world since 1980. In the last 20 years, fewer than a dozen Americans have cracked the world's top five at either distance.

Once a strength, the middle distances have become no man's land for American runners. The gilded footpaths of Jim Ryun, Marty Liquori and Dave Wottle, trod in the golden era of American middle-distance running, remain unchallenged, an unusual failure for American athletes in a glamour event.

In a nation of 22 million recreational runners, why can't the United States' best men get out of the back of the pack?

''I wish I had an answer,'' Ryun, a Republican United States representative from Kansas, said. ''It is mystifying.''

And with another Olympic Games approaching, the angst and frustration over America's decline in the middle distances is building anew.

''Come on, my mile record is a good time, but it should have been broken by now,'' said Scott, whose American record is 4.56 seconds slower than the world record. ''We have been mediocre for years. Outside of a few individuals, we've gotten worse.''

Steve Holman, the last American miler to be ranked in the top 10 worldwide -- he was 10th in 1997 -- knows about the growing disenchantment. ''People were anxiously awaiting the next American savior in the mile before I came along,'' Holman, who ran in the 1992 Olympics, said. ''It was something people asked me about all the time. Frankly, that savior didn't come along. Everyone is still waiting.''

The miler Alan Webb, a former high school phenomenon who has posted promising international results this year, may yet fill the gap, but he remains a long shot in an Olympic-quality field. Webb, 21, is scheduled to run the quarterfinals tonight in the 1,500 meters, the metric equivalent of the mile, at the United States Olympic track and field trials in Sacramento. There is little depth behind Webb among Americans in the event: While he is ranked 21st in the world at 1,500 meters, the next ranked American, Charlie Gruber, is 38th.

There is no shortage of theories nor lack of debate about why American male middle-distance running has declined. It is a touchy subject in the track world, in part because sprinters from the United States remain among the best in the world, and also because American performances at other nonsprint distances, like the 10,000 meters and the marathon, have been substandard, too.

Wottle was the last American man to win a middle-distance Olympic gold medal, in the 800 meters in 1972. Days later, his roommate at the Munich Games, Frank Shorter, won the marathon. That is the last Olympic gold medal American men have won in distance running.

American women, on the other hand, have largely been more successful at the middle distances. The consensus is that compared with women in other countries, especially those in developing areas of the world, American women have enjoyed significantly superior facilities, opportunities and economic support. The most prominent explanation for what has caused American men to fall behind their top international contemporaries is that there is so much more high-level competition, particularly from runners from African nations like Kenya, Morocco and Ethiopia.

In the 1972 Olympics, athletes from 23 countries won track medals. In 1971, when Liquori was the last American man to be the world's top-ranked 1,500-meter runner, there were two African runners in a top 10 dominated by Europeans. Thirty years later, the top five runners were African, as were two other runners in the top 10.

But few in the track community think American runners have to concede the middle-distance medal podiums to the fastest Africans. There are essentially two schools of thought about what has been holding the Americans back. One says that the American system of training runners is flawed; the other, which is more damning, says that the latest generation of young American athletes just does not care about running fast miles anymore.

''For years now, we haven't had the support system in place for runners after they get out of college,'' said Vin Lananna, who will coach American Olympic runners at the Athens Games next month. ''There are few places for them to train and no way for them to make a living. If you look at countries like Morocco or Spain, they get all their top runners working together under a national coach. In Spain, they have at their disposal all the scientific resources of a national institute for sport.

''We are way behind the eight ball on all of that, especially the science of optimal training methods.''

There have been efforts, paid for by Nike, to bring top American runners together to train. Until recently, Lananna had been a coach at one such enterprise, called the Farm Team.